“ ‘I would appreciate your putting me into direct contact with Ms. Whitten so that I may approach her about this possibility. I would also like to see more of her work.
“ ‘I am grateful to you for having acquainted me with the work of this young artist, and I hope good things may come of this for all concerned. Sincerely, John.’ ”
“I don’t believe it,” Ann said. “He’s talking about me?”
“Of course he is. Don’t you recognize your own name? He mentions it twice.” Irene replaced the paper on her desk and leaned back in her chair. Her eyes were twinkling. “How does it feel to be acknowledged, at seventeen, as a ‘talented artist’?”
“How does it feel? It just doesn’t seem possible.” Ann shook her head in amazement. “He likes my work! He really likes it! This is crazy!”
“Well, start believing it soon, my dear, because it’s a fact,” Irene said. “You’re good, and it’s time you realized it. John Griffith has seen artists come and go, and he can recognize talent as few people can. Here’s your future, Ann, right in front of you. How will we celebrate?”
“I just can’t wrap my head around it. He wants me to come to Boston?”
“On a full scholarship.”
“But how can I?” Ann said. “I’m getting married.”
“Marriage can be postponed for a little while, can’t it? Is next June the only time the church is open?”
“No, but—I’m engaged, Irene. The announcement was published in the Tribune. I’ve got my ring.” She lifted her left hand and looked down at the diamond in its old-fashioned setting. At the angle at which she held it, it caught the slanted afternoon light that flowed through the art-room window and threw a crazy darting pattern on the opposite wall.
“An announcement and a ring don’t constitute a royal summons.” The smile faded from Irene’s face. “When the announcement was made, you thought your whole future was here in Modesta. Now, all of a sudden, things have changed. There’s more for you, Ann, than becoming a teenage bride. You want more, don’t you?”
“I—always dreamed—of painting professionally,” Ann said. “I just never thought it could really happen. But I love Dave. I can’t give him up.”
“You won’t have to. Dave loves you, too, doesn’t he? You know he’ll want what’s best for you. He’ll wait a little while if it’s going to make a difference in your happiness.”
“I think he would,” Ann said, “but he’s had a rough time of it lately. His mother’s death really hit him hard. He was very close to her. There’s that house now—so empty—”
“David is a grown man,” Irene said firmly. “A grown man can manage to live for a while in an empty house.”
“It’s all so sudden.” To her own amazement, Ann found herself blinking back tears. “You think you’re set for one thing, and here’s something else. You were so amazing to send in those sketches, Irene—to have thought I was good enough for them to mean something. I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m really happy. I’m just so mixed up inside.”
“Talk it over with Dave,” Irene told her gently. “Tell him how much this means to you. If he loves you as much as you think he does, he’ll understand. He won’t try to hold you back.”
He wouldn’t understand, of course, thought Irene.
“How do you think I’d feel,” he would ask her, “getting married to a woman who earned more than I did?”
No, wait, Irene told herself in sudden confusion. Those were somebody else’s words. It was Bob, her Bob, who said, “I love you, Renie. I want to take care of you.”
“Take care of me? By cutting me out of what I’ve worked toward for so long? You call that loving me?”
“Renie, baby—” He hadn’t even understood what she was talking about. “It’s the man’s career that matters. You’ll stop working, anyway, when babies start coming.”
Robert Morrell or David Brewer, it made no difference. One man was like another. The stolid form that Ann had drawn on the tractor was Any-man. She hadn’t even attempted to sketch in the features of the empty face.
Poor child, she faced such painful disillusionment. Still, it was better to get such things over and done with. Once she discovered for herself the shallowness of Dave’s caring, she’d be able to cut herself free and move upward.
As I could have, Irene thought bitterly, if they’d let me.
The hatred rose within her, thick and stifling. So many long years, wasted! But, no—they didn’t have to be. These girls had potential that was hers to develop.
Ann—and Kelly—and Erika—and Jane—
Irene Stark closed her eyes, and their images swam before her—leaping, soaring, carrying her with them into the shining places of her dreams.
Chapter 11
On Saturday, November 11, at 9:00 p.m., Kelly Johnson lay on her bed, fully clothed in jeans and T-shirt, listening to a CD and staring at the ceiling. The bedroom door was closed and secured with a hook that she’d purchased that afternoon at the hardware store and screwed into the door frame. Then she’d gotten a hammer from the tool chest in the garage and pounded the eyelet into the smooth polished wood of the door itself.
“Why are you doing that?” her thirteen-year-old sister, Chris, had asked in bewilderment.
“To keep you out,” Kelly had told her.
“You don’t have to do that,” Chris said with hurt in her voice. “I don’t want to come into your crappy old room.”
“You’re always in there. You were there in the other bed this morning when I woke up. You sneaked in during the night without even knocking, and Mom keeps coming in all the time to check on me and see what I’m doing. I can’t even do my homework in peace anymore without somebody barging in and interrupting.”
“It’s scary sometimes with Dad not here,” Chris said. “Last night there was a funny noise like somebody was on the roof.”
“You’d better get used to it,” Kelly told her bluntly. “You’re not going to come running in here every time the wind blows.”
The cold cruelty of her own voice had pleased her, as had the look on her mother’s face when she had seen the disfigured door surface. It pleased her now to lie on the bed and dig the heels of her dirty tennis shoes into the yellow quilted spread. It had pleased her a few days ago to turn down Ethan’s invitation to homecoming, the invitation she’d been dreaming of for weeks and had thought he might be too shy to issue.
“No, thank you,” she’d said when he’d finally gotten it stammered out in its entirety. No excuse—no apology—no explanation—just “No, thank you,” as though he were the last person on earth she would want to be seen with. And later, when Tammy had called about triple dating, she’d said, “No, thank you,” again with the same distant coolness.
“What was that about?” her mother had asked her as she ended the call.
“Nothing important.”
“It was Tammy, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Johnson had prodded. “She was inviting you to do something.”
“I said it was nothing important.”
“It’s important for you to see your friends,” her mom had objected. “I know you’re upset with your dad and me, and I understand that, but you can’t withdraw from the world. You need your friends more than ever now. You need people to talk to—”
“I don’t need anything,” Kelly had said.
And now, in the haven of the locked room, she repeated the words softly to herself—“I don’t need anything. Or anybody.” Not her parents, not Chris, not poor Ethan with his hopeful, cocker spaniel eyes, not Tammy, not Ann—not anyone. It was crazy to depend on other people, to let them be important to you. All it did was make you stupid and vulnerable and blind to reality.
“This isn’t anything sudden, Kelly,” her dad told her. “Your mom and I have been growing apart for a long time.”
They had, had they? Well, it had certainly been carefully hidden from her. As far as Kelly knew, her parents had never had a figh
t in their lives. They were absolutely compatible; they liked the same foods, the same books, the same music. They went to church on Sundays and shared the same hymnal; they attended PTA meetings together and held hands at the movies. They even looked alike. Kelly had read somewhere that people who lived together for a long time grew to resemble each other in appearance, and her parents were living proof, with the first strands of gray appearing in their brown hair in exactly the same spots and the laugh lines crinkling at the corners of their eyes in identical fans.
What a nice, normal, congenial family they were, the Johnsons, snowmobiling together in the winter, camping together in the summer—except for this past summer, when they somehow hadn’t gotten around to it. Funny, she hadn’t thought much about it until now, the fact that this year there had been no camping trips. Kelly herself had been so busy, working through June as a camp counselor, going up to the lake for swimming and cookouts, playing tennis and goofing around with her friends. Fiddling around while Rome burned. Goofing away the days, while her parents’ marriage disintegrated before her unseeing eyes. When exactly did her dad meet the woman he now thought he was in love with? During the summer? Before that, even? Was he seeing her, perhaps, on those sweet spring evenings when he supposedly had been working late while Kelly knelt in the cool twilight and helped her mom put in the backyard petunia beds? Had her mom suspected nothing? Wouldn’t any normal, intelligent woman know when her husband was falling out of love with her? And if she’d known, why hadn’t she done something? How could she just have stayed put, making meat loaves and baking cookies and quilting her daughter a lemon-colored bedspread and pretending nothing terrible was happening?
Laura Snow’s parents were divorced. That was the main reason Kelly had voted for her when she’d been proposed as a member of Daughters of Eve. She’d felt so sorry for her—in tiny Modesta there weren’t a lot of broken marriages. “The poor girl,” she’d said when the name had been suggested. “Her parents are divorced, you know. No wonder she’s a loner, and she probably compensates by overeating.”
Laura’s dad lived in another state. She hardly ever saw him. He was remarried, Laura had said once, and there was a baby half brother whom she’d never even seen. Would her own dad remarry? Kelly wondered. It seemed likely that he would, since he was in love with somebody. Would there be a baby, another Johnson child living right here in Modesta? Would it look like Kelly and Chris, with a round, rosy-cheeked face and brown eyes and brows that almost met over its nose? Whose genes had produced that look? “Those Johnson girls look so much alike,” people were always saying. “They’re two peas in a pod.” Teachers who had had Kelly in middle school kept calling Chris by her name. “I keep forgetting,” they apologized. “It’s like having the same student twice.”
Would they now have the chance to have the “same student” three times? Or four? Or even five? Would her dad start all over again with a new life as though this first one had never existed?
And what about Mom?
What would happen to her? What did a forty-year-old housewife do when there was suddenly no man to keep house for? Get a job? If so, what? There’d been a discussion about this at one of the Daughters of Eve meetings. When the middle-aged housewife gets forced into the workplace, Irene had told them, the employer isn’t going to excuse her lack of experience.
Poor old housewife, Kelly had thought. Nice, kind, stupid Kelly Johnson, always concerned about the fate of the unfortunate, but never applying the facts to herself or to anyone close to her. Poor Mom. Why couldn’t she show some compassion for her mother? She loved her, didn’t she? Of course she loved her. This was Mom, not some strange “other person” housewife—Mom—so why didn’t she unlock this stupid door and go out into the hall and down the stairs to where her mother sat in the living room and put her arms around her and hold her and break through this terrible wall that held them both in check, so that they could cry together?
“You need your friends more than ever now,” her mom had told her. Concerned about her. Loving her. Worrying over Kelly, not over herself. Wonderful, self-sacrificing Mom, and what had it gotten her? A load of crap, that’s what. A load of shit, is what Madison would call it—outspoken Madison, who called a spade a spade. Kelly had never called anything by an ugly curse word like that. Words like “shit” weren’t used in the Johnson household. Maybe that was why Madison didn’t have any hang-ups and Kelly did.
That’s why I can’t go downstairs, Kelly told herself now. It’s because I have a hang-up. A hang-up about being stupid, which, in its way, was just as terrible as being cruel, because both things hurt equally in the long run. Her mom had trusted in love, and that was stupid. Her mom had built her whole life on the premise that she was half of a perfect couple, and now she wasn’t anything. She was a cartoon character, walking around the house, emptying ashtrays that didn’t need emptying, cooking big meals that no one could eat, changing sheets that didn’t need changing, and it was all so stupid because she should’ve known. She should’ve known!
“It’s the woman who gets it in the teeth,” Irene had said. “Always.” Calmly, she’d said it, the words cold and careful. And now Kelly understood something she hadn’t picked up on before. The woman Irene had been talking about had been herself. The teacher who’d been forced out of that Chicago school hadn’t been a “friend” at all—she’d been Irene. No wonder she knew—no wonder she’d been trying to warn them!
Her mother had said she needed to talk to her friends. All right, then, she would do just that. She would talk to the one friend who would really understand the situation.
Kelly got up from the bed. The music was still playing. She’d set her iPod to shuffle songs randomly—now it was an old song by John Denver that her parents had played at their wedding. It was called “Annie’s Song,” and he supposedly wrote it for his wife. “Let me lay down beside you […] let me give my life to you…” Bullshit!
Kelly crossed to the door and unlocked it. She opened it and went down the hall to the phone-charging station her dad had set up by the stairs. He hadn’t wanted them texting when they were supposed to be doing homework, so all phones were plugged in to charge each night. The sounds of the TV drifted up the stairwell. Her mother and Chris were watching something with a laugh track.
Kelly didn’t have Irene’s number, but she figured it must be listed. She called information.
“Do you have a listing for Irene Stark in Modesta?”
There was a pause. Then the operator confirmed and connected her number.
“Thank you,” Kelly said.
It wasn’t until the phone had begun to ring that she remembered that this was the night of the homecoming dance. Irene, as the sponsor of Daughters of Eve, would be acting as one of the chaperones.
Well, so much for that, Kelly thought as the phone continued to ring with no response. Then, just as she was ready to hang up, there was a sudden rasp and Irene’s voice, sounding hurried and breathless, said, “Hello?”
“Hi. This is Kelly.” She couldn’t believe her luck. “I thought you would’ve left for the dance.”
“I was just going out the door,” Irene explained. “I’m running a little late this evening. I’m sorry. Were you girls worried that I wasn’t going to get there?”
“No, it’s not that,” Kelly said. “I’m not calling from the school. I’m at home. I just—just—” She didn’t know exactly how to continue. What was it that she did want, anyway? Irene would think she was crazy.
“I just wanted to talk a little while,” she finished lamely. “I forgot what night it was. I don’t seem to have it together these days.”
“Small wonder,” Irene said sympathetically. “I don’t really need to be at the dance until time for the presentation ceremony. Would you like me to come pick you up?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Kelly said hastily. “It isn’t that important.”
“I think it is. Needing to talk is very important.” Irene spoke firmly. ??
?You live on Third Street, don’t you?”
“At one twenty-seven,” Kelly said. “The big white house on the corner. Look, you don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t. Stop worrying, Kelly. There’s no big problem. We can come back here to talk and later stop by the dance for the drawing. Put on a dress, and I’ll come by for you in about ten minutes.”
“I wasn’t planning on going to the dance,” Kelly said.
“You might change your mind. If you decide not to, I can drop you back at your house on my way to the school.” She paused. When she spoke again, it was quietly. “It’s all right, Kelly. I know what you’re going through. I know all too well. I’ve been through it, too. When I was your age exactly, my father walked out on my mother and destroyed her completely. I’ve never forgiven him for his callousness, and I never will.”
“He—destroyed her?” Kelly said shakily.
“She had a mental breakdown. She never recovered. You see, I know—” Her voice hardened. “I do know, Kelly, what it’s like to have a father incapable of giving love. You’re terribly hurt, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Kelly said softly.
“And you’d like to punish him, wouldn’t you? To make him suffer the way he’s making you and your mom suffer? That’s natural, Kelly. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. For men, marriage is a game, something they can walk into and out of as the mood strikes. They think they can have it all without giving anything themselves. Women have to be tough to make it in this world, Kelly. Women have to band together, because when it comes right down to it, our female friends are all we have.”
At 10:30 p.m. the DJ took a break, and Mr. Shelby, the principal of Modesta High, announced the results of the elections for homecoming queen. Peter Grange proudly escorted a smiling Madison Ellis to the front of the gym to don her crown and conduct the drawing for the prizes that had been donated in support of the athletic fund.